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Jessica Tearney-Pearce

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Jessica was awarded the Woolf Institute Cambridge Scholarship to commence her PhD studies in 2016. Her project investigates worship, devotional, and ritual practices on ships and related to the sea in the medieval Mediterranean. A key element of her research highlights that the very nature of medieval seafaring and seafarers necessitates that these encounters and experiences developed among and were shared between adherents of different religions, where boundaries would seem more obvious. Understanding their cultural and religious interactions will allow her to elucidate particular incidences of interdependence amidst groups who were mutually both strange and familiar.

Jessica completed a BA, BA(Hons), and MA in History & Ancient History at the University of Auckland, NZ. She then moved to the UK, where she undertook an MA in Art & Cultural History at the Warburg Institute, London, and subsequently continued her research whilst gaining experience in the sectors surrounding academia by working for a heritage organisation, an academic publisher, and research institutes.